Trailer Park: Off the Grid

Welcome to “Trailer Park,” our regular Friday feature where we collect the week’s new trailers all in one place and do a little “judging a book by its cover,” ranking them from worst to best and taking our best guess at what they may be hiding. We’ve got six new clips for your perusal, ranging from a teaser for a flick that puts Tim Riggins on Mars to an extended, eight-minute version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trailer; check ‘em out after the jump.

John Carter

There are few filmmakers we’re rooting for more than Andrew Stanton, the Pixar director behind Wall-E and Finding Nemo who’s making his live-action debut with this long-gestating film version of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ literary franchise. But boy oh boy does this just look goofy as hell, a fundamentally silly mix of Gladiator, Avatar, and the bad CGI characters of the Star Wars prequels. Points for using the “Kashmir” cue, though.

Tim & Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie

Well, Tim & Eric made a movie. And this is pretty much exactly the trailer you’d expect for it. Not sure what else to add to this. Um, nice font?

Wrong

Confession: We never got around to seeing Quentin Dupieux’s Rubber, last year’s minor cult hit about a psychic, killer tire, because, well, it was about a psychic, killer tire. So we don’t really have a basis for comparison with regards to this trailer for his Rubber follow-up, a Sundance selection that apparently involves the search for a lost dog and a great deal of random weirdness. On the other hand, this oddball trailer certainly got our attention, so… well done?

Shame

Steve McQueen’s sex-addiction drama (and its proud embracing of its NC-17 rating) has been quite the little buzz item this week, so it only makes sense that Fox would put out a red-band trailer in advance of its limited release today. The previous, green-band spots have highlighted the movie’s slick yet introspective style; this one is (unsurprisingly) heavy on the sex, though it’s more than a mere peep show, using the shock sex edits to add tension to one of the film’s centerpiece scenes. The trailer campaign for this difficult film has, thus far, been peerless, and this final addition to it is no exception.

The Invisible War

Kirby Dick is one of the most gifted yet underrated documentary filmmakers in the game. His fascinating Sick was a must-see, his Twist of Faith was nominated for an Oscar, his This Film Is Not Yet Rated remains and indispensable point of reference in discussions of the movie rating system, and Outrage was a blood-boiling investigation of the hypocrisy of anti-gay legislators. For his latest film, he looks at the horrifying (and mostly unexamined) problem of rape in the US military; the numbers are astonishing, and the first-person narratives appear to be plentiful and heart-wrenching. Dick’s latest premieres at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Your author wanted nothing more than to share the extended, killer, eight-minute trailer for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo when it screened ahead of a few select screenings back in September; it was basically the only benefit to seeing that Straw Dogs remake. Now, weeks later, it’s finally available, so you can now join us in our month-long refrain of “JUST COME OUT ALREADY, GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO.”